After reading this code it appears that the owners of myredbook need not be actually the people convicted of the illegal acts which are illegal by California state law. The owners of myredbook only need to facilitate the illegal acts of others. Since some posters / advertisers on myredbook have been convicted of prostitution this is likely the basis of using the California state prostitution laws in the myredbook owners federal indictment.
Furthermore, since the owners of myredbook used an interstate means, the Internet, and transferred funds between banks, maybe, in different states. This would be the other basis necessary to violate the above referenced federal law.
So it looks like the myredbook owners may be in pretty big trouble.
There are many similarities between the old laws prohibiting homosexuality and laws prohibiting prostitution. both concern sexual behavior that are seen, by some, as sexual deviance. Men are more likely than women to be concerned with homosexuality. Whereas women are more likely than men to be concerned with prostitution.
In both cases what drives the classification as illegality is icky-ness. A heterosexual male cannot imagine having sex with another man - it is just icky for him. Similar, a woman wanting a monogamous relationship, with romance, sees prostitution as disgusting and just plain icky.
Most women cannot understand why any woman would become a prostitute. So they imagine that there must be some awful reason: human trafficking, dominance by a male (pimp), etc. For some prostitutes this is the case, but there are a vast number of women who practice prostitution and it is not.
For these women selling sex is not icky - they explain it as being uplifting since it provides a high level of financial security. They actually find it difficult to understand why other women take issue with it. Their sexuality may be different. I understand that bisexual women have a more male like sex drive and I bet there are higher percentage of bisexuals in prostitution than in the general population. Also lesbians may be over represented in prostitution - the dildo just has a guy attached to it that pays the rent.
So I propose here that the laws against prostitution are driven by perceived icky-ness (a form of sexual bigotry) as the laws against homosexuality.
All counts of the indictment, including the money laundering, are based upon two conditions. Both must be true for any of the counts in the indictment to be judged a crime. These two conditions are:
a) use of interstate mail and communications for illegal activity
b) the illegal activity is specifically a violation of the California code prohibiting prostitution: facilitation of prostitution.
So the federal indictment is completely dependent upon the criminal violation of a state law. However, myredbook, or its owners, have never been indictment, let alone convicted, by the State of California. This is after more than a decade of operation.
Furthermore there is a federal law stating that web site owners / operators do not take any legal responsibility for the content provided by others. It does not matter if the web site owners charge or not charge these other parties for using the site.
This seems to be a really really bad legal case. At minimum the feds are presuming that the owners of my redbook would be convicted of a state crime, if the state would just prosecute them. As we all know, the American legal system presumes innocence until being convicted in a court of law.
So legally the feds don't seem to really have a case. All they seem to be doing is hassling the owners of myredbook with the intent of shutting the web site down.
So this totally appears to be someone in the justice department driving a moral or religious agenda and not really a legal one.
Actually, advertisements were free. They made money on enhanced reviews of providers and clients. In other words, one could, for a fee, dig deeper into reading comments between and about users of myredbook.
The owners of myredbook were still a third party in these comments and did remove postings that could encourage child prostitution, robberies, or other serious violent crimes.
I see much of the argument here is about "facilitating prostitution," that such facilitation would trump free speech protections, both constitutionally and in other laws. But the opposite is true, as highlighted by the EFF, third parties, who are not involved in the illegal activity have a right to discuss that activity and do not take responsibility for the actions or postings of others. With respect to the Internet, there is a federal law, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that Web service providers cannot be "treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".
After reading this code it appears that the owners of myredbook need not be actually the people convicted of the illegal acts which are illegal by California state law. The owners of myredbook only need to facilitate the illegal acts of others. Since some posters / advertisers on myredbook have been convicted of prostitution this is likely the basis of using the California state prostitution laws in the myredbook owners federal indictment.
Furthermore, since the owners of myredbook used an interstate means, the Internet, and transferred funds between banks, maybe, in different states. This would be the other basis necessary to violate the above referenced federal law.
So it looks like the myredbook owners may be in pretty big trouble.